KITTY EMPIRE:
God, it was loud. I’ve been to metal gigs that left my ears ringing for days, I’ve been to clubs where the bass swapped my spleen round with my appendix, but [b]MBV[/b] live gigs around the time of [b]Loveless[/b] compared unfavourably to dental treatment without anaesthetic.

They wore earplugs onstage. We were young, and we were too hard to protect our hearing. My boyfriend’s dad, waiting for us over in the car park, was disgusted. “That’s not music,” he railed like a former TV sound engineer, “that’s just noise.” Well, yes – the extended grand finale of “You Made Me Realise” was a brutal beatitude of distortion, feedback, and 14 effects-pedals all being struck by lightning at once. But the noise had shape, and nuance, and meaning, and made you feel like a god. We endured it, because it was MBV, and they’d taken three long years to follow up the magisterial Isn’t Anything.

They’d turned the sculpting of noise into something blissful and otherworldly, even as it permed the cilia in your ears. We were there, too, to check that the band still had human form, and hadn’t evolved into some translucent studio amphibians who’d forsaken sunlight for so long that they had vestigial eyes. In the event, you could barely see the Valentines, because the strobes made sure you were blinded as well as deafened.

*****
plus [b]WERE YOU THERE?[/b]

Not even [b]UNCUT[/b]s war-weary gig-hounds have been to every great show in history – but you lot probably have.

Email Allan_Jones@ipcmedia.com, or [b]share your memories[/b] in the comments box below, of the ones we might have missed, and we’ll publish the best in a future issue!